Month: July 2008

There’s a two point gap in Georgia in the latest Insider Advantage poll. The poll of polls puts it at 5.

Could action videogames help erase the gender gap in science?

While men scored better than women before training, after playing Medal of Honor both women and men improved significantly. The difference between males and females after the training was not significant — the gap between women and men was almost completely erased. Even more impressively, the researchers retested both groups five months later and found that both groups were still performing as well as they had right after training. The group playing Ballance showed no significant gains.

And the audience was rapt:

More than 1,000 music-lovers showed up on Saturday, July 5, in a German town to hear a change of note in the longest-running and slowest piece of music ever composed. Eccentric US composer John Cage (1912-1992) planned his composition to last 639 years, meaning more than a dozen generations of musicians will be needed to play it on an automatic, as-yet unfinished organ at Halberstadt, Germany. Entitled ORGAN2/ASLSP, it began in 2001 and has so far reached its sixth note.

That’s a tiny bit little longer than the Sex And The City movie.

Another index of US decline.

That’s a slightly more accurate metaphor for R&R’s preferred Republican base than Sam’s Club. Ross summarizes a core worry behind Grand New Party here:

If you look at the marriage rates in the 1950s and 1960s across social classes, the upper-middle class, the working class and the poor all got married and divorced at about the same rate. The all had children in wedlock or out of wedlock at about the same rate. That’s changed dramatically over the past 50 years. So upper-middle-class Americans are still behaving like bourgeois, 1950s surburbanites. They’re getting married, they have low divorce rates, they’re very unlike to have children out of wedlock. That’s not true for the working class. What you see in the white working class, in fact, is a trajectory that parallels, in alarming ways, what the black working class went through in terms of collapsing marriage rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s. So we argue that that’s one of the biggest challenges facing the American working class, and it’s at the root of a lot of the inequality and a lot of the economic anxiety that are big factors in this election year.

And what on earth can government do about that? I’m going to re-read the book in the next few days, and give a proper response. But sadly I find few of their many creative government prescriptions for this malady plausible.

Those stimulus checks have boosted online pornography sales.

The punch-line: the optional panels will only power "part of the 2- to 5-kilowatt air conditioning system."

Ross seconds Ruffini and suggests McCain run on the surge. Matt describes this idea as "a little bit crazy." He recommends the Big Lie instead. I take his point, but this $1 million independent ad is pretty effective:

The love-fest continues as Ailes hires Wolfson.

Marc Lynch notes a few signs that they are stepping up support:

In conjunction with Nuri al-Maliki’s trip to Abu Dhabi, the UAE announced that it had appointed an ambassador to Baghdad and would forgive Iraqi debt ($7 billion according to the Arab media, $4 billion according to English reports – not sure why the discrepancy).  Jordan appointed an ambassador, and the King reportedly plans to be the first Arab head of state to visit Baghdad.   Iraq is now reportedly beginning talks with Kuwait over outstanding issues, including debt, oil fields, compensation claims, and the border. This is capped with an editorial by al-Sharq al-Awsat’s editor calling on Maliki to respond to the Arab opening with real national reconciliation, and a guest editorial in the same paper by Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh.

Maybe Maliki’s threat of setting a timetable for US withdrawal was a suck-up to his neighbors. But it’s still a good sign: we want Iraq’s neighbors to be part of stabilizing the place. And as the age of Obama seems to approach, the ground is shifting.